IN the round-ball game, they call it getting one back - a quick reply to a goal scored by your opponent.
For Tony Abbott, a conservative true believer as passionate as any football fan, his chance is rapidly approaching.
Kevin Rudd is labouring under the weight of some disastrous polling and a needlessly messy fight with the country’s miners.
Viewed across the whole term, an Abbott win would come against the run of play, but then, politics like football, is a funny game.
Still, the talk of an election in August or perhaps early September persists even though it would seem crazy with the polls as they are.
For whatever reason, there is a palpable sense in Canberra that parliamentary sittings over the next two weeks will be the last this term.
While MPs are due to return in late August after the winter break, government insiders doubt it will happen. “I can’t see us coming back before the election,’’ one said.
It would be wrong however to mistake this sentiment for confidence. Rather, there is a sense of fatalism on the Labor side - not so much of impending defeat, but of what will be will be.
Government members undoubtedly are shell-shocked by their precipitate fall from public favour but they are out of answers having already fired all their big guns on hospital reforms, education and training, the federal Budget and most spectacularly, on tax. The only game-changer left in the play-book is the election itself. And some now feel there is little to be gained by waiting especially because, as the good jobs figures showed on Thursday, (WA’s jobless rate is just 4.1 per cent) the economy is now straining at the bit, increasing the likelihood of another interest rate rise in coming months.
Perhaps Kevin Rudd was on to something when he said recently that a year working for him is like working seven elsewhere. Such are the relentless demands that the whole government is already showing signs of third or fourth term fatigue.
It is difficult to say what Rudd himself thinks about election timing but you would imagine at least that he has a plan.
If so, what is it? If it involved arresting a dangerous drift in the mining tax debate, he has done the opposite by again predicting negotiations could run on for months. If it was meant as a joke, nobody is laughing.
It fell to Simon Crean this week to act where the PM could not bring himself to by admitting the consultation phase had been bungled. One of just two Cabinet ministers in Rudd’s team to have been a minister before, Crean’s motives have been mis-interpreted as cracks in Cabinet unity. But that misses the point. Rather, Crean’s comments were crafted to draw a line under the process to date so as to facilitate a new process from here. By legitimising the miners’ complaints to have been left out of the information loop until the last minute, he has effectively also removed that complaint as an impediment to what happens now. And it is what happens now that is important, not who told what to whom and when.
Pointlessly, the Government had allowed itself to be dragged into the argument over the consultation process, and was being hit over the head daily with it. Crean, unlike Rudd and Swan, concluded it was not helping an already deeply flawed process.
Like the strategically silly shelving of the ETS and numerous less important announcements, the mining tax’s unveiling was too clever by half - a symptom of a government that is run by advisers and former advisers. This matters because ultimately, the tax’s botched presentation has weakened the Government’s bargaining hand.
It is the triumph of cleverness over strategy and is the kind of thing that can happen when you become obsessed with winning the battle of the daily media cycle while forgetting about the war.
There are signs that cooler heads in the resources sector are also realising that outright refusal to yield could backfire. Distinguishing themselves from ridiculous references to communists and the like, more sober types such as BHP’s Marius Kloppers are treading a bit more gingerly.
“We need to always scrupulously stick to playing the issue and not the man,’’ Kloppers told one newspaper.
This is wise given that the most likely outcome of this year’s election remains the return of the current government - albeit with a reduced majority and a big grudge. The Greens would likely hold the balance of power in the Senate too and they can hardly be described as pro-mining.
Labor MPs hope that a compromise on the tax is done soon taking it off the front pages. That combined with the welcome morale boost and diversion of Australia doing well at the World Cup, could be just the thing to prompt a visit to the Governor General five or six weeks from now.
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